


unquantifiable

by myhomeistheshire



Category: Bones (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, spoilers through s3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-08
Updated: 2018-03-08
Packaged: 2019-03-28 13:36:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 844
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13905117
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/myhomeistheshire/pseuds/myhomeistheshire
Summary: Booth dies. And then, he doesn't.(Brennan doesn't know how to deal with this.)





	unquantifiable

they’re solving a case. they’re always solving a case.

 

bones thinks about nothing but murder for days, for nights. any minute she’s not at the jeffersonian she’s mulling it over in her mind, or researching from home, or writing. her next novel is turning out dark and gritty; streetlamps and docksides and the way that blood feels different when it’s pumping out from a familiar chest.

 

some nights under the stars she feels herself becoming less of an anthropologist; more of a subject. she sits under the fountain two blocks from her apartment and runs her fingers through the water, wonders about the corroboration between life and this liquid substitute - _babbling brooks,_ they say, _living streams_. she feels more and more like the objectivity she once held is slipping through her hands as fast as the droplets; this weight on her chest, the wandering - she walks home as the light meets the darkness in a cataclysm of hues, and wonders if somehow the death she meets is making her more alive.

 

‘you’re off your game, bones’, booth tells her one day in the lab when she’s surrounded by trapeziums and distal phalanges and is too far gone to insult him; she turns and looks up at the face of her partner, confidante, friend. logically, she knows that his face is nothing more than skeletal structure and organs, the same as any other; but she still sees the war on his face. booth is still a soldier, still a man with too many scars and a bullet wound over his heart, and so she looks up at him and smiles.

‘what?’ he asks, wiping his cheeks; ‘i got something on my face?’ and she shakes her head because he will always be this to her; light and constant and home.

 

this doesn’t make assimilation any easier; while the sun is up she is _bones_ , sewn up with facts and science and logic. she dances with booth, playing their game of hopscotch, back-and-forth, children bickering with no consequences further than the day; and at night she remembers what it’s like to feel ephemeral; to weep over blood; to be nothing more than _temperance._

 

 _you were dead_ , she thinks as she looks up at booth, alive and yet still feeling like a dream; they’ve talked it over with sweets a million times, sessions with tight fists and closed lips and _i’m fine, i’m fine, i’m fine._ she thinks on her midnight walks of a future without booth in it; where the funeral was a real one and she is left to do this job on her own. he was dead in her arms. he bled out on her palms. she’s fine, she’s fine, she’s fine.

 

she doesn’t talk about it. feelings are psychology are factless ramblings that are better left locked up; and she keeps it that way until it changes. until they’re on a case, and this one is different because she has three hundred bones on her table instead of two hundred and six. she is a foster parent but she should not be holding a baby like this; in pieces, shattered and fractured and torn. zack works beside her, covering the silence with chatter and pictures and facts, but she can’t help but focus on anything but the bones. on the scaphoid and triquetal, both snapped in half; on the ulna and malleus and all the bits, broken apart and left for her to piece together on a cold metal table. she has yet to quantify why she has this seeming break in her mentality - logically she knows that humans die. that everyone dies. that, with bad luck, any one of them could end up on a table like this. and yet she’s still torn; these bones here should not be a baby. a life should not have ended up like this.

 

(booth had almost ended up like this.)

 

that night she sits in the lab, staring at the pieced-together skeleton of an eight month old, hands by her side, heart in her throat.

‘it’s 3am, temperance,’ booth says softly when he comes up behind her; and maybe it’s the bones, or the sleep deprivation, or the way he says her name; but whatever the reason, she looks up at him - this man who is the other half of her, who she thinks of before herself - and she reaches out one hand. lays it on his chest, directly where the bullet landed; where she pressed blood soaked hands to skin; where she sobbed and cursed and swore to god that if she left her, she’d kill him. she lays her hand there and looks up at him, open and empty and _tired_ ; and he looks back with the familiar gentleness she’s grown so used to seeing in his eyes.

‘temperance,’ he repeats, laying a hand on his own; ‘temperance.’

 

they wait there beside the bones of an infant in a lab full of death, while temperance breathes in and out; in and out. focuses on the skin, warm beneath her fingers. alive. alive. alive.

 

 

 

 

 

 


End file.
